Designing a consistent language is *very* hard

[Dejan Lekic]

On Saturday, 28 April 2012 at 11:42:19 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> On Saturday, 28 April 2012 at 09:41:06 UTC, Nick Sabalausky 
> wrote:
>> "Paulo Pinto" <pjmlp at progtools.org> wrote in message
>> news:jngarb$14un$1 at digitalmars.com...
>>> Am 28.04.2012 10:18, schrieb Guillaume Chatelet:
>>>> Sorry for the noise but I think a few language designer out 
>>>> there might
>>>> like this one :
>>>> http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/
>>>>
>>>> I think Walter and Andrei will smile ( or cry ) reading it.
>>>> It's no trolling here, I do think this post is very valuable 
>>>> and
>>>> relevant from a language design perspective.
>>>
>>> Well, I cry everytime I am using it on my web site, but the 
>>> effort to
>>> port the scripts is not worth it.
>>
>> Abandoning PHP is *always* "worth it".
>
> Rewriting seldom brings anything new. It almost like starting
> from zero, without the benefit from all the bug fixes the
> software has had along the years.
>
> The hours wasted porting to a new language, could be used adding
> features to existing code base, or refactoring.
>
> I know how I am speaking about, many of the big bucks we get on
> consultancy jobs, are from companies that decide to keep 
> rewriting
> their software on the flavour of the month framework, just 
> because
> "everyone else is doing it".
>
> So I rather keep my "almost clean" PHP scripts running, as 
> getting
> to the trouble of switching ISP just to be able to rewrite the 
> site
> in a more sane language.
>
> --
> Paulo

Nicely said. Precisely my experience. We are all Java programmers 
in my team, yet we maintain old ASP and PHP code that previous 
colleagues did in the past. Redoing them from scratch in Java or 
D is out of question.

Speaking about PHP... I believe we all read that article. I could 
say worse about ASP than what that article says about PHP.